Kamathipura has a new address

The growing cost of real estate has forced Mumbai’s sex workers to move from their decades-old home to more aff ordable neighbourhoods in Turbhe and Thane.

Turbhe’s red-light district usually wakes up late. So even at 11 am on Thursday, the neighbourhood is eerily quiet. The only person around is Rani, cooking rice on a stove and peeping around a half-closed door to see who has come calling. The 26-year-old prostitute moved to Turbhe two years ago, from Kamathipura. “Some of my friends and I moved out of Kamathipura and started our own trade here,” she says. “We didn’t want to work under Amma [the ‘madam’] any longer, and found the room rent to be a lot cheaper here, at Rs 3,000 per month instead of Rs 10,000 in Kamathipura.” Rani, who was trafficked from Uttar Pradesh and forced into prostitution over a decade ago, says she now saves enough to send money back home.

Mumbai’s infamous red-light districts of Kamathipura and Falkland Road have been felled, not by moral policing, but by the other bane of Mumbai: The cost of real estate. With their proximity to south Mumbai, these neighbourhoods are becoming rapidly reclaimed for other kinds of trade — mostly smaller commercial units making bags, engaging in zari work or catering. This ‘upscaling’ has made these neighbourhoods unaffordable for sex workers, who have had to move out. In fact, members of the NGO Prerana, which has been mapping these three red-light areas, has found that the number of brothels in Falkland Road and Kamathipura have dropped, respectively, from 410 and 464 in 2016, to 382 and 447 today. While in Turbhe, the number of brothels has grown from 205 in 2016, to 236.

A neighbourhood near Turbhe station, close to a hillock, is now home to the sex workers. ‘Red area’, as the locals call it, has also been provided facilities like tap water and better roads by local corporator Suresh Kulkarni, and a whole new ecosystem — similar to the one in Kamathipura and Falkland Road — has sprung up around the sex trade. Prerana’s mapping show that Turbhe has three medical clinics (as opposed to 17 in Falkland Road and 11 in Kamathipura), and a host of tea stalls, restaurants and bars, panbidi shops, ration shops, general stores, toilets and such. There are no medical stores, beauty salons or a police chowki yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Turbhe’s status as a new red-light area is sealed by the presence of 10 NGOs working here (Falkland Road and Kamathipura had 12 and 10 each). But other than its name, there is little to set Red Area apart from the rest of the neighbourhood, since the prostitutes’ quarters are indistinguishable from those of residents who have been living here for almost 40 years. “I came here 10 years ago, when the locality was not so crowded. Now, this is a thriving neighbourhood,” says Vidya, 60, who runs a brothel in Red Area. “I worked in Kamathipura for 20 years after coming from Nepal. Then one agent told me about this place so I moved here, and found that it is a lot cheaper.”

Above: Turbhe; Sex workers from Kamathipura are shifting base to a locality in Turbhe, Navi Mumbai, which is referred to as ‘Red Area’.

Oddly, most prostitutes living here still go back to Kamathipura and Falkland Road in the evening. “The sex workers come to Kamathipura in the evening, but don’t necessarily stay there,” says Priti Patkar, co-founder and director of Prerana. “Besides Turbhe, a lot of them have also moved to Thane and Raigad. The small commercial units are now occupying the buildings that used to house the brothels.” Real-estate experts say that despite this demographic shift, the social taboo attached to Kamathipura and Falkland Road has still kept most families away. “At the moment, these areas are financially-viable only for small commercial units,” says real estate and finance expert Ajay Jain.

In Alexandra building, which is located at one end of Kamathipura, on RS Nimkar Marg, only two floors are occupied by sex workers. The other two are full of commercial units. Muhammed Parvez, 29, has rented a room on the third floor for the last two years, to run a bagmaking unit. “It doesn’t matter if prostitutes are living below; they are doing their work, and I am doing mine,” he says, sitting in a 120-sq-ft room that he rents for Rs 10,000 a month.

Similarly, while Kamathipura’s 12th, 13th and 14th lanes are still inhabited by prostitutes, the rest are full of women bidi workers, mostly from Andhra Pradesh. Sikandar Ali from Uttar Pradesh has rented a room on the ground floor of 13th lane. “I started my catering business 10 years ago, and supply food to all of Mumbai from here,” he says, least bothered that the room next to his is still occupied by sex workers.

According to CPI leader Prakash Reddy, who grew up in nearby Khetwadi, “the red light area was just a small part of Kamathipura’s composite culture. They even donated funds to our protest against the Vietnam war.” Curiously, the neighbourhood’s original residents were Telugu workers who migrated to Mumbai for work in the late 18th century. “Kamathi means those who are engaged in hard labour (from the Marathi ‘kam’), and hence had named the area after them,” says Professor Raja Dixit, member of the Indian Council of History Research.

Saadat Hasan Manto, who romanticised and humanised Kamathipura in his writings, provided a different picture of the place, says journalist Rafique Baghdadi. “References to Kamathipura in Manto’s literature has a different perspective than we imagine,” he says. “Under British rule, it was sometimes called ‘Safed Gali’ because it was inhabited by European sex workers. Then women from all over the world started coming here. It was only after 1940 that the women here were largely Indian.”

Above: Kamathipura; The rooms once occupied by brothels in Kamathipura and Falkland Road, have made way for small commercial units engaged in bagmaking, zari work and catering